In a cloud computing environment, computing is delivered as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network, such as the Internet. In such an environment, computation, software, data access and storage services are provided to users that do not require knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services.
Currently, if a user desires to build a cloud computing environment, the user has to purchase different hardware and software components which are then integrated amongst each other. For example, in an x86 environment, the user purchases individual physical machines, where each physical machine would either have internal storage or require the user to purchase and configure external storage. Furthermore, switches would have to be purchased to connect the network devices in the cloud computing environment and separately configured in order to network them together.
Such a process in building a cloud computing environment is inefficient and time consuming.